Spanish Huck Finn
COSMAN, MAX
Spanish Huck Finn Before Noon. By Ramon J. Sender. New Mexico. 408 pp. $6.50. Reviewed by Max Cosman Contributor, "Commonweal," "Nation," "Personalist," "Arizona Quarterly" There are men who...
...But this is not so important as something else that is occurring...
...Chronicle of Dawn covers his 10th year...
...He has become a student in a boarding school run by the College of Saint Peter Apostle...
...It is a triumph of creativeness for another reason...
...The third novelette, The Villa Julieta, took three more years to come out...
...It is an autochthonous, a somewhat frightening, a strangely dignified Huckleberry Finn for Spain...
...Subject to the chemic changes of physiology, he is approaching the threshhold of life's keenest mystery —passion...
...Their love correspondence by carrier pigeon is proof again that ingenuity can triumph over adversity...
...In part, too, this may be so because Sender's focus blurs here and there...
...Sender will no doubt furnish us with acute notations of human nature and of heart-rending scenes of social wrongs perpetrated by Fascists...
...That Sender did not at the time have any more assured notion of what he intended to do with his reminiscences may be gauged by the fact that his next work in the series, Violent Griffin, did not see print till 1954...
...his Panza—with all apologies to the worthy gentleman to be named—is his tutor Mosen Joaquin...
...He was forced to leave the land by the sort of Communist machinations George Orwell has reported on in Homage to Catalonia...
...To them tyranny and the resistance to it has never been something impersonal, as it is to most people, but a most familiar matter...
...Reviewed by Max Cosman Contributor, "Commonweal," "Nation," "Personalist," "Arizona Quarterly" There are men who are monuments while they are alive...
...In meeting the exigencies of new situations he often loses Pepe, makes him an auxiliary to others...
...his knightly adventures are with fathers who cannot understand him (there are two: his own and Valentina's), with opposing boys like Valentina's cousin and Carrasco, and also with his Universiad, an intended history of the world...
...Delicately Sender touches upon the "inner hurricane" that has begun to sweep through the boy...
...Of such men, marked, hunted or exiled during the crucial Thirties and Forties, five are still with us...
...Taken together, the trilogy presents the emotional coming-to-age of an amazing youngster, Pepe Graces...
...Purportedly the record of a friend of the author's in a French concentration camp (Sender and others of the broken army of the Spanish Republic were interned when they escaped to France), its disguise was too uncertain to fool anyone...
...Never a leader in the Spanish revolutionary movement, he was nevertheless implicated in it...
...One must assume that the translation is accurate...
...The Villa Julieta is perhaps the weakest installment in Sender's trilogy...
...Before Noon is actually a series of novelettes...
...Either as idealists or ideologists they have done much and have borne much...
...In the years since, Sender has achieved a well-earned haven as a professor of Spanish literature at our University of New Mexico...
...Andre Malraux, Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus and Ignazio Silone are not our concern on this occasion...
...His wife and a number of further relatives were butchered by Fascist forces...
...The initial volume, Chronicle of Dawn, was published by itself some fifteen years ago...
...Though fleeting, it does give cause to ask whether the Nobel Prize winner did not learn a thing or two from his contemporary...
...An American citizen now in his middle fifties, he puts aside for the time being his multi-leveled, metaphysical fictions like The Sphere and The King and the Queen and in this volume gives himself to autobiography, or rather to its elaboration in novelistic dress...
...With its predecessor it is here Englished by his wife, Florence Hall Sender...
...But worthwhile as all of that is, it will still have to take a back seat to what we have now...
...Others, as usual, are about Pepe and Valentina...
...He fought for the Spanish Republic as a major on the General Staff...
...Some of them limn a Uriah Heepish creature like Felipe, who has the odd notion that fleecing one's father is a desirable act...
...Which is not to say that memorable pages do not show up in the book—they do...
...Certainly it is adequate and in keeping with that of Before Noon, which was done by Willard R. Trask...
...One cannot help feeling that future novellas will see Pepe through his glorious confusions, and then through the austere ones of manhood with its war and eventual mortal imprisonment...
...Violent Griffin deals with another phase of Pepe's life...
...This is the relation one may trace, between the Brother's monologues and those of Clamence in Camus's The Fall...
...The end of The Villa Julieta has Pepe matriculated in the Instituto of Zaragoza...
...A miniature Don Quixote, Pepe's Dulcinea is Valentina...
...Ramon J. Sender is...
...In part, this may be so because the magic of nostalgia that puts a pre-pubic world before us dulls as the contradictory shades of adolescence draw closer...
...From playing the lead in Calderon's Life Is a Dream to escaping examinations with some companions by eating saffron, his behavior is again a howl...
...He knew imprisonment under the Primo de Rivera dictatorship...
...For in the evocations of youth that make up Before Noon, he has already established his masterpiece...
...For all the poking of fun at monkish limitations (Pepe's desire to read Voltaire and Rousseau rocks the institution), Sender has as enduring a pious study in the Lay Brother as one may hope to get anywhere...
Vol. 41 • May 1958 • No. 19
